You'll need an App for that

I’m not sure if Joe is a real person or a bot. I hope he’s a real person, because if he is a bot, I fear for the future of humanity and the hope that technology will save us.

I started my conversation with Joe when he popped up on the bottom right-hand side of my screen and asked if he could help. I was trying to book a flight. In the old days, you’d walk into a travel agent, deport yourself in a comfortable seat and speak to a lady in a crisp white shirt and colourful neck scarf. After giving her a rough idea about where you wanted to go to, you’d engage in polite conversation about your holiday plans while waiting for a ticket to come out of their dot matrix printer.

But apparently technology has made this better. You can now book from the comfort of your sofa. This started out well. You found the airline’s website, filled out your name and credit card details and it was done.

I don’t want to appear like a grumpy old man, but the truth is that I am. Everything has gone downhill since. It started when they websites wanted personal information they don’t need. If I want to book a flight, why does it matter where I live or what my date of birth is. I guess it stops three-year-olds stealing their Dad’s credit card and plotting a trip to Disneyland. But if they were clever enough to do that, I doubt if they would have entered their actual date of birth.

Then they started upselling. Offering Insurance, car rental and hotel suggestions and making it as difficult to navigate these pages as it is to find your way around IKEA. Then someone came up with the great wheeze of splitting the fare. It used to be taken for granted that you needed a seat on a plane, would quite like to sit next to your partner and to bring a suitcase along on your travels. Somebody, probably Ryanair, realised that if you sell these separately, you could spin the myth that air travel is cheaper than ever, when actually it ends up at the same cost it always was, after you have added on all the items you used to take for granted.

Apart from everything else, this makes booking a flight more complicated than brain surgery, with a similar pain impact. After you have unclicked all the items you never wanted to purchase in the first place, entered more personal information than even your wife knows and committed your credit card details to a website that otherwise filled you with suspicion, you might finally get the “Flight Confirmed” message. Or more often than not a message that would send you back to the first page like a naughty child.

That’s how I ended up talking to Joe. The Auckland to Sydney route is dominated by the national carriers of New Zealand and Australia, who clearly call each other every morning to agree their eye-watering fares.

There is an alternative to this. An Asian interloper that is trying to sneak into this market. We travelled with them at Christmas and they were half the cost of the national airlines. However, my daughter was disgusted that there was no TV screen on the back of the seat in front of her, I was annoyed that my seat that was stuck in the reclined position and left me staring at the ceiling for the whole trip and we were all upset on the return trip when they seated the three of us in random seats throughout the plane.

Nevertheless, I turned to them again last week when I wanted to book another flight to Sydney and saw the eye watering fares that Air New Zealand were quoting. Since Christmas, their website has changed in one key aspect. You now have to set up an Account. You can no longer be a casual traveller, you have to a fully signed up member, willing to accept daily emails and share all of your personal details. They have also enforced two factor authentication. This is normally enforced by banks and government agencies or other parties that need to protect you from fraud. It’s rarely used by websites that simply want to sell you a product.

I went along with the charade. Entered my phone number and pressed the button that promised to send me a text that would finalise my account set up.

The text never arrived and that’s when I started talking to Joe.

“Please uninstall the App and re-install it”

“I’m not using your App, I’m looking at your website”.

“Thank you for your response. Please uninstall the App and re-install it”.

“I’M NOT USING YOUR BLOODY APP”.

At this stage, the conversation changed. Joe passed me onto an anonymous manager who gave me an official case number, as though I’d stumbled into a murder case. His suggestion was that I install their app and try to do a booking through this. I was indignant that technology had got us to the point where an App was needed for a simple transaction but did it anyhow.

The App didn’t work. I still didn’t get a text to finish my account set up.

I gave up and booked a flight with Qantas. It was expensive, but it came with a meal, movies and a bag included in the price, without having to navigate 12 screens.

The cheap airline wasn’t giving up though. They sent another email from a “Do-Not Reply” email address, saying that if I wanted to keep the case open, I should reply to the email.

Two weeks later, I got my final message. It said that they were closing the case and if I wanted it reopened, I should log on to my account, ignoring the fact that my problem was that I couldn’t open an account.

I hanker for the old days and ladies with crisp white shirts.

 

 

First World Problems

Seth is about 18 months old with chubby cheeks and a flock of blond hair. In normal circumstances you would think he was as cute as kitten. But with a sixteen-hour non-stop flight on a packed airplane, he is public enemy number one.

We had boarded in Dubai. Like me, most passengers had come off connecting flights of varying lengths and had forsaken sleep on that leg with the anticipation of making up for it on the long journey to Auckland.

Seth, however, had different plans. He started crying before the plane took off. As a parent, I immediately recognised the type of wail. He was overtired. Had probably come off another connecting flight where his Mother had desperately tried to get him to sleep and had unfortunately failed. He had missed his window and no amount of gentle rocking was going to carry him into slumber.

This crying went on for two hours until the food arrived. Then his mother released him so that she could sleep and he took off like he had just stolen something. It seemed that he had an issue that he wanted to take up with the Captain, because that’s the direction he headed for on about 25 occasions. Each time he took off he would mutter a high-pitched scream and repeat the word “Bubba” at an ear splitting frequency. Each time, his exasperated Mother or one of the even more exasperated crew would pick him up and carry him back to his seat as he screamed and wriggled in an attempt to escape.

This went on for about five hours, by which stage the other 300 passengers would have happily strung him up in the galley. Thankfully, he must have fallen asleep for a few hours before the wailing started again as we approached Auckland.

It wasn’t like in the good old days when Children were seen but not heard. I took my first long haul flight in 1988 in the glamour days of international travel. Mind you, it was with Aeroflot, so there wasn’t much glamour involved. I can’t remember if they showed a movie, but if they did, it would have been in Russian. Smoking was discouraged, apart from down the back by the toilets. The flight crew all seemed to be undercover KGB agents or former Olympic shot putters. I remember at one point a muscular stewardess walked down the aisle with a basket of apples and flung them to the passengers in the way a kid on a bike delivers newspapers.

But at least the airport experience back then was pleasant. A nice lady would look at your silky tracing paper ticket and take your bags with little fuss and very little queuing. In the years before cost accountants had looked at staffing levels, airports had appropriate staff to deal with the passengers coming through. It’s an industry that knows exactly how many customers to expect each day and pretty much how many there will be each hour. But you still queue for hours at check in or security, as though the airlines and airport staff are surprised that so many people who had pre-booked flights had actually turned up.

In 1988, after a perfunctory look at your passport, you could sail straight through to the plane. None of this belt and shoe removing nonsense.  Back then, you could bring a rifle or a live animal on board and nobody would bat an eyelid.

My next long haul excursion was the grand daddy of all my trips. This was a round the world tour in 1995/1996. I flew on the queen of all long haul aeroplanes, the mighty Boeing 747. They definitely would have played a movie on these flights, but it would needed to be bland enough to meet the tastes and needs of two year olds and eighty year olds. Once airborne and after dinner was served (the food was better then too) a large screen would descend in the cabin and headphones would be distributed. A caption would explain that the inflight movie had been formatted for airplane enjoyment, which was code for “cut to ribbons to exclude all the naughty bits”. This meant that it would run for about an hour and make no narrative sense.

If you didn’t fancy the movie, there was another option. You could listen to a selection of golden oldie songs introduced by an octogenarian BBC DJ, who mentioned the airline after every song in return, one assumes, for free flights.

I started making more regular flights after that to Australia and New Zealand. And then when I moved to the Southern Hemisphere, I could regularly fly home to Ireland.

The entertainment got better. TVs in the back of seats brought variety and meant that you could watch what you wanted, rather than having to settle for the common denominator. But comfort went the other way. As I became physically bigger, the seats became smaller and with tighter leg room.

In the past month, I’ve finally been able to sample the delights of long haul travel after a four year hiatus caused by “the Thing”. I was curious to see if anything had changed. The needless queuing at check in, passport control, security, boarding, disembarkation and baggage retrieval has got worse. A two flight I took in Europe swallowed up six hours of my time from arriving at one airport and leaving the other. Four years ago they insisted you turned off your phone during the flight in case you interfered with the electronics and risked crashing the plane. Now they insist that you keep it on, so they can sell you overpriced Wifi.

All in all, it’s become a very uncomfortable and boring experience. It used to be just as much about the journey as the destination. Now it’s all about the destination. The days of glamour travel has gone the way of VHS and Walkmans. I’d even watch only Russian movies on board if we could get them back.

Sue, The Sovereign Citizen

Sue is angry. She can’t remember when it started. Maybe it was when she moved out of the city and bought a lifestyle block in the country with her husband. But she doesn’t think so. In her now hazy memory, the first few years were good. They escaped the rat race and bought five acres and some animals and spent a couple of years doing up a draughty 1930’s villa.

It was all good until the council told them they couldn’t get access to the town’s water supply. Then that “bloody goofy toothed” woman became Prime Minister and in Sue’s mind the whole thing went to shit.

All the environmental laws that the new Labour government brought in seem to be targeted directly at Sue. And after all the hard work that she and husband had done, the layabouts and work shy people seemed to be winning out.   

Then Covid came along and Sue disappeared entirely down the rabbit holes that the pandemic offered. She was already suspicious of anything Jacinda Ardern said. She was trying to ban cows after all and was poisoning the land with 1080 bait. And Sue had moved to the country to immerse herself in the freedoms that New Zealand life is supposed to offer. The freedom to slaughter your own animals, to own as many vehicles as you like, and to beat your kids if you saw fit.

Ruby was one of the first people that Sue had met when she visited the local farmer’s market on her first weekend in the country. She was a naturopath and a life coach and had sold Sue a home-made remedy that cured the hay fever that several Auckland doctors had failed to mend.

She had never been sick since, so she wasn’t going to listen to some bloody woman in Wellington telling her what to do. Particularly when it came to wearing a mask in the supermarket. Sue didn’t even wear shoes when she went there and was often in her pyjamas.

It was a short trip from hating Covid rules to liking Trump conspiracy theories on Facebook and believing that Pfizer had secret plans to buy the South island to house the illuminati after the vaccines had killed off all the regular people.

Then in February 2022, Ruby invited Sue to a demonstration in Wellington. Three weeks later Sue was throwing bricks at the police and setting fire to tents. She got home and was fully radicalised and started reading parts of the Internet you can’t find with a google search.

Ruby was the first to mention the term Sovereign Citizen. Sue embraced it enthusiastically. She stopped paying her rates, car tax and rego. Sent back every letter that came from a government department, with a message that they had no authority over her.

I belong to the side of politics that laughs at people like Sue. I’m a city living liberal, who wouldn’t know the right end of a cow to milk.

But when I was younger, I dabbled with left wing politics. We were the ones who wanted to overthrow the state. We believed that society was rigged against us. That it was controlled by hidden forces in dark rooms, smoking large cigars in their stuffed waistcoats.

I realise now that these are the same arguments that Sue makes on Facebook. Except these days the arguments come from the right and not the left. I guess the other difference is that our heroes were trade unionists and revolutionaries that lived in bed sits. Sue’s heroes are billionaires like Trump or Alex Jones. We also liked to protest by joining marches and picketing visits by foreign leaders that we disagreed with. We still paid or taxes and fines. We wanted to build a better society and not to withdraw from it. 

Sue wants to withdraw from society, not to change it. Every country has its own version of sovereign citizens, but I sometimes wonder if New Zealand has more than its fair share. Unlike Australia, which was colonised by convicts who didn’t want to be there and rapacious gold diggers, New Zealand white settlers came from British and Irish people searching for a bucolic lifestyle. They wanted to escape from the smoke filled cities of Victorian Britain and to live out their lives on the verdant pastures of the Southern Isles.

The reach of Government was pretty thin back then. She had to home school your kids and rely on family remedies and the kindness of strangers if anyone got sick. It bred a culture of independence. Many city dwelling Kiwis have a desire to move to the country and live ‘off grid’.

Most of Sue’s friends have taken that first step to live outside the real world. Unfortunately, they have also tapped into feelings of neglect and despondency within the Maori community. This is a country built delicately on the foundations of a treaty signed in 1840. It’s a treaty that hasn’t always been adhered to and it has built up a culture of disconnect between many Maori and the state.

The sovereign citizen movement was quick to ferment this disconnect and like many revolutionary movements and governments for that matter, they are quite happy to use Maori as the muscle in their clashes with authority.

We live in strange old world now. Nationalism, nativism and isolationism is rampant throughout the western world. It’s like we’re living in the 1930s again and that most people have ignored the past and are now condemned to repeat it. Sue doesn’t like being called a Nazi, but that’s what she is. I just hope she never needs a state provided hospital or has to drive her untaxed car on government built roads. I hope she never has to post her toxic messages on Facebook that connects to a Government built cell phone tower. She also doesn’t like being called a hypocrite. But then neither did I when I was a young radical who wanted to work for American Banks.

I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled

I moved to New Zealand at the venerable age of fifty. Some say that fifty is the new thirty, but only if they are innumerate or refuse to accept the concept of linear time. 

I certainly didn't feel like thirty when I stepped off that plane from Edinburgh but I think it's fair to say that my body was in pretty good working condition, give or take a missing testicle or two. I wish I could say the same now.

The first thing to go was my left shoulder. I leant back from the driver's seat of my car to retrieve a bag from the back seat. Something popped and when you're my age and hear that sound, you're best to freeze and to check your extremities from the outside in. I found that I couldn't lift my left arm beyond elbow height. Luckily for me, that's not the arm I use to hail barmen or to reach the cookie jar on the top shelf at work. So, it took me a day or two to drag myself to the physio. He poked and prodded me like a farmer inspecting a bullock at a country mart. 

After a few non-productive sessions and a scan, he announced that I had 'frozen shoulder', which I took as code for 'we haven't a bloody clue."

Next to go was my right knee. I remember descending the escalator at Auckland Central station and being in a hurry to catch a soon departing train. I tripped on one of the steps. It was so slight and my recovery so balletic and graceful that none of the other commuters even noticed. But a pain similar to being stabbed shot through my knee. This time the physio was more on the ball, or patella to be more precise. She diagnosed some arthritis and warned that this was a ticking time bomb that would lead to canes and Zimmer frames in later life. 

It's unpleasant to lie on a bench in a cold and clinical treatment room, looking at posters of fit and healthy athletes and having your future mapped out to in such depressing tones. 

She kindly put it down to all the football I played in my twenties and not the extra twenty kilos of weight that the knees have had to support since I stopped playing football.

At this point you might be assuming that these physio visits were not only treating but costing me an arm and a leg. Thankfully, New Zealand has an excellent system in place for such events. This is a country famed for its physical sport and outdoor endeavours. 

Accidents are common, so to avoid the leisure and sports industries from being inundated with law suits an Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) was set up. This is funded through taxes and pays for treatment when you have an accident. The only issue is that you have to have had an accident to avail of it. “Tripped on the stairs at the station and twisted my knee” will generally pass muster. But “woke up in the morning with a sore ankle” is going to be refused.

This happened to me when my left knee popped. It clearly got upset that his right compatriot was getting all the attention from the pretty physio. I woke up one morning with a pain in my knee that wasn’t there before I got out of bed. When I filled out my ACC claim form at the physio, I had to use the full power of my imagination to conjure up an excuse that had elements of truth layered with exaggeration. Dreaming of scoring the winner at Highbury didn’t make it onto the form.

My back, however, is the most regular offender. It first paid a painful visit about three years ago and has popped back about once a year since. On that first occasion, I was seated at the station and stood up to walk towards an incoming train. My back suddenly went into spasm and I crawled, almost on my hands and knees towards the carriage.

I spent the morning on the boardroom floor at work with a lap top nestled on my chest. Luckily, I was able to procure a lunchtime physio appointment (at this stage I’m such a regular customer, I clearly have gold card status) and the application of some strange smelling ointments and some acupuncture did the trick. I was able to shuffle home that night and within a week or so, I was back to normal.

For the purposes of my ACC form on this occasion, I was able to reference an incident two days earlier, when I helped carry an 80kg table top up two flights of stairs. I probably didn’t bend my knees properly on this occasion, but then I was probably scared of doing more damage to them at the time.

You would think I would have learned from this experience, but two of my subsequent issues with my back can also be traced to lifting things that a man of my age should be avoiding.

New Zealand is, of course, an active place to live. Part of the attraction of living here is the great outdoors. Hiking, swimming and generally being a sporty bloke is part of the deal.

I’ll be 58 in a month’s time. That’s an age when you tend to look towards retirement as opposed to a new career, for example. I think part of my problem is accepting this. That my body is showing the normal levels of aging and decay. Time, after all, waits for no man. When I was in my twenties, years moved like treacle, these days they race like an express train.

In the words of the great Leonard Cohen, I ache in the places where I used to play. But I’ll keep fighting, raging at the dying of the light. I’ll just be a little more careful when descending escalators and lifting anything heavier than a pint of beer.

Before the Deluge

There was a time when I could think of nothing better than having the opportunity to work from home. In my first job, I shared a small office with two smokers who seemed to be engaged in a daily competition to ingest the most nicotine. Back then most communication was done by telephone and when I had my head down trying to work I would be regularly interrupted by one of them shouting abuse at a tax officer or client who was slow in paying his bill.

At least the commute was easy. It was about ten minutes on a bike, eight if the gale from the Irish Sea was behind me.

Commuting has been an issue in every job I’ve had since. I’ve sat in traffic jams for hours in London, Luxembourg and Dublin. Melbourne was probably the best in this regard, but we couldn’t afford to live in the city centre, so even with excellent public transport, I still spent two hours a day on a tram or on my bike.

The technology to work from home was not in place for most of my working life. I’ve owned a PC since the early nineties, but it was only when I got to Australia in 2007 that I found a job that would allow me to connect to work.

But I was working for a Corporate Bank then, with a boss with the management style of Tony Soprano. The work from home option was set up to allow you to work at weekends or in the evening.

My then boss was so old-school he was probably educated in Latin. I had a colleague with a two hour each way commute who wanted to work from home between Christmas and New Year. He was treated with the contempt that a conscientious objector would have received during the First World War.

My current employer has always been more flexible. They were pioneers of the concept of the four day week which they adopted into a flexible model long before Covid came along.

When that little respiratory tickle came along, the game changed for everyone, in New Zealand and beyond. The first lockdown was a novelty I guess. It lasted for seven weeks and we were amused by washing our groceries with a damp sponge, zoom calls with friends and family overseas and the chance to walk in parts of the city that are not normally open to plebs like me.

Auckland has had several lockdowns since and they became progressively more boring as the novelty wore off. With each lockdown I became more nostalgic for the old days of commuting and office life. Commuting in particular is seen as a total negative. But my cycle to work kept me healthy and gave me a front row seat of the city waking up each day. Even when I was stuck in a car, I could listen to whatever I like without being told to ‘turn that bloody racket down’.

Time in the office is a delicate balance between fascinating social engagement and annoying assholes that you have nothing in common with other than the same employer. But you can work this to your advantage. I spent two hours today chatting to the people I like. We discussed whether the new Auckland Mayor is as big a dickhead as the media are portraying him and whether Ireland should throw the six nations championship and concentrate on the World Cup. I work in a large open plan office were you can see the dickheads approaching like slow moving Wildebeest on the savanna and take appropriate avoiding action.

But I also got lots of work done. Technology has come a long way but you can’t beat standing at a whiteboard with somebody to nut an issue out or having three screens and a colour printer at hand. I’ve made a lot of improvements at home in the three years since Covid came along. But it’s impossible to recreate the office set up experience. When I’m in the office I plug my laptop in and sit back in my comfortable chair and watch all my applications pop up magically. At home, I have to jump through more hoops than a Russian hacker trying to get into the CIA database.

These days I can work from home as often as I like. During the school term, I drop my daughter to school, grab a coffee and then amble into work. I work from home once a week, mainly to catch up on admin. And I have to admit it’s nice to have the house to myself.

School was supposed to start again today and normality would have resumed. Then the rain came and all that was thrown in the air. Last Friday, parts of Auckland got 300mm of rain in 24 hours. That’s about 40% of the annual rainfall in Dublin, a city that I knew from personal experience is wet and miserable for most of the year.

It brought landslides, power cuts and flooding to many parts of the city. We were told to work from home for the rest of the week and school reopening got pushed back to next Tuesday. We got the dreaded “home schooling” text from the school principle.

Triggered is a strong word. It invokes trauma, memories of dark days buried in your sub conscious. But it feels appropriate. Being told to work from home for even a day or two brings back memories of those lockdowns. I’ve been working for forty years, most of that in an office environment. I don’t exactly pine for it but I don’t like being told I can’t go there. Covid brought more than a virus, it also unleashed an existential crisis for many people. We have lost the ability to plan for the future with any confidence. I’ll be back next week. At least I hope so. You can’t be sure of anything these days.

Engerland!

One of life’s little pleasures is to receive a message out of the blue from a long lost friend. This happened to me around Christmas 2001, when one of those old fashioned airmail envelopes arrived at my parents’ house. It was from a friend that I worked with in Luxembourg several years earlier who had found an old letter from me when she was moving house.

For younger readers, that’s how we used to communicate with each other in the 90’s. You might have somebody’s landline, but we were rarely home in those dance filled days, so the best way of getting a message to them was through an old fashioned letter in the post.

Anyway, we started using a new- fangled communication method called e-mail and even got to meet on one occasion. She was English and a devout Christian, so we spent most of our day together in St Paul’s Cathedral in London, mouthing sweet nothing’s to each other in the whispering gallery.

My memory is hazy, but I think I might have harboured romantic intentions, but obviously not strongly enough to do anything about them.

Our email exchanges continued up to the 2002 World Cup in Japan and Korea. Ireland and England both qualified for that competition and she mentioned in an exchange that she’d be cheering for Ireland in our match against Spain and said she presumed that I’d reciprocate when England were playing Denmark. I replied that 700 years of history prevented me from supporting England in any endeavour.

I was then subjected to what would now be called ‘ghosting’. I haven’t heard from her since.

I mention this because it highlights the sensitivities English people feel towards the lack of support from Ireland for their national football team.

There are some in Ireland who see this as our problem. That we have a national chip on our shoulder or that it shows common currency with the extremists who supported the IRA during the troubles. They argue that a modern, self-confident country wouldn’t feel the need to dislike their neighbours. The people who put forward this point can be found arguing for Ireland to re-join the Commonwealth and proudly display mugs with the image of Princess Diana on their mantle-pieces.  

I think this argument misunderstands the nature of sport. That it is all about liking one team and having a rivalry with another. It also misunderstands the nature of International sport. The key part of this word is “nation”. We fly flags, sing national anthems, kiss badges but then try to pretend that the events have nothing to do with the history of the countries involved.  

This is a particular problem with England. They have a colonial past and have left a trail of misery across Africa, Asia and Ireland. And in the old Empire countries that were populated by European settlement, they have made themselves unpopular by using the young of those countries as cannon fodder in their various wars. I’ve lived in Australia and New Zealand and they choose England as the country they would most like to see lose at sport, if only because the English patronised and humiliated them in the early days of the Empire.

There is an assumption that if you hold a sporting bias, then you must hate the people who support those teams. I support Louth in Gaelic Football, Wexford in Hurling, Carlton in AFL and Arsenal in English football. As a result, I dislike Meath, Kilkenny, Collingwood and Tottenham Hotspur. I know many people who support these teams and while I enjoy winding them up and they like winding me up, I don’t dislike them as people. Some of them are my best friends.

Only my English friends seem to have a problem with this sporting rivalry. It’s ironic, when they have no problem laughing at German losses.

I wonder what the reasons for this are? I sometimes think that English people have a soft spot for Ireland. That we are the young cousin, that despite a few rebellious years, are still fondly looked upon. They love our sense of humour, admire our music and flock to our pubs.  And maybe they can’t except when that beloved younger cousin laughs at your pitfalls.

But maybe it’s just that old fashioned lack of proportion that sometimes happens in sport. I mentioned that I’m a Wexford hurling fan. While we have an enmity towards Kilkenny, it’s not reciprocated. They have ten times as many titles as Wexford and as a result they see us an irritant and not a rival. Even more frustratingly, they’ll patronise Wexford fans on the few occasions we beat them. We’d much prefer it if they hated us.

England must feel the same towards us. We had a few good years in the 80s and 90s but they don’t really see us as a threat. We struggle to make tournament finals whereas they are always looking to win them.

This doesn’t happen in Rugby. Ireland are on a par with England, if not better, and as a result, no English fan expects support from Ireland.

I might be wrong of course. Maybe I do harbour some deep seated republican sympathies. I bristle at Ireland being included in the “British Isles” for example and particularly when people describe it as “just a geographical description”. I also get annoyed when commentators talk about The British Lions instead of their proper title of British and Irish Lions.

Rationally, I accept that I come from an island that has a long intertwined relationship with its neighbour. My surname, for example, has English roots. There is a lot at play. History, politics and the normal rivalries that come with sport. I try to take all this into account and to be as fair-minded as possible. But that didn’t stop me emitting a guttural roar and leaping out of my seat and punching the air when Harry Kane smashed that penalty over the bar against France. 

I measure out my life in World Cups - Part 3

I last updated my World Cup odyssey in 2010, when I was living in Australia and France were embarrassing themselves in South Africa (karma, huh?). I wrote two installments of this tale in that long Melbourne Winter and it’s time to update the story now. Twelve years and three world cups have come and gone.

2010 became Annus Horribulis. By the time I’d written the second part of this story, I’d already had a bike accident that broke an arm, an eye socket and my cycling confidence. My Mother died two weeks after the World Cup final that year. I can’t remember where I watched that game.  I’m guessing at home but the shadow of my Mother’s impending demise hung over it.  I flew back to Ireland to say goodbye to her then flew back again a week later for the funeral. Those were carbon-unfriendly times.

Later that year, I had a visit from the Big C and paid the ransom of my left testicle to get it to go away.

By the time the World Cup in 2014 rolled around another seismic event in my life was taking place. I was made redundant in April of that year and my departure from Australia was put in train. By the time of the final in July, we were in a hotel in Abu Dhabi on our way to Edinburgh. I watched the match at 1pm in the morning in the courtyard of the hotel. It was Ramadan and while Abu Dhabi is not a big drinking place at the best of times, during Ramadan it is like a Presbyterian wake.  They set up a ‘bar’ in the courtyard for which you had to pre-purchase tokens. I bought $50 worth of vouchers and that entitled me to four small cans of Seven Up. That was the strongest drink you could buy and made me realise that ‘bar’ has a different meaning in the Islamic world than where I grew up.

If nothing else, it convinced me that I would never attend a World Cup in the Middle East. Thankfully, with the controversy that is going on in Qatar right now, that is never likely to happen again in my lifetime.

2018 took place in Russia. Another country I have no intention of visiting. I was living in New Zealand at this stage, but cunningly booked a month-long visit to Ireland that allowed me to watch games in real-time, or at least at times of the day when drinking is socially acceptable. International sport is tailored for the European market. That means that games are usually on in the middle of the night or early morning here. That’s made me realise that I enjoy sport much more when I have a beer in my hand.

I watched the England v Croatia Semi-final with my Dad and we took guilty pleasure in England’s defeat. I was in Glenbeigh, County Kerry the following weekend when the final took place. It was a beautiful summer’s day, made better by the fact that I was in a pub.

Eight days later my Dad was dead. He passed away in the early hours of the 24^th July. Eight years to the day since my Mother’s death. My father was a very thoughtful man and I’m sure that he hung on past midnight so that we’d only have to pay for one anniversary mass each year that would cover both of them.

I’m now onto my 15^th world cup. Don’t remember the first one (thankfully, as England won). But I reckon I’ve watched all of the others, in six different countries.

This year, the games are in Qatar. I’m glad Ireland didn’t qualify. We’re rubbish at the moment and would only embarrass ourselves. But the thought of thousands of Irish fans unable to get a drink of beer is unimaginable. It also means we are not faced with the moral dilemma of playing in a tournament mired in corruption and played in a country that fails to respect gay people or migrant workers.

I read about this a lot in the woke European media that fill my newsfeed. It reeks of hypocrisy of course. Take England for example. As Irish people would know, they don’t have a proud record of treating their own migrant workers well. No professional footballer in England has felt comfortable enough to come out while still playing. This is because of the negative culture towards LBGT culture within British sport.

The underlying problem is that the whole world is not moving at the same pace when it comes to what we define as human rights. In fact, some of the world is moving backwards. America has recently allowed for abortion to be made illegal in many states. It also allows for armed militia to shut down gay bars.

Africa, Asia and South America are well behind Europe when it comes to liberalising reproductive and sexual rights. There seems to be an assumption that the World Cup should only be held in countries that match the social and moral structures of Western Europe. This is the same message that 19th-century colonialists gave. Only white men should be in government because they are the ones with the education and culture to manage the task.

It’s a great danger to say that we’re better than everyone else, that we exist on a higher plane. By all means campaign for changes around the world, but if we boycott countries we don’t like, then we’re at risk of excluding most of the world.

Anyway, I’m boycotting much of this world cup because the games are on in the middle of the night here. I will get up early to watch the final though. It’s a 4am start here. But I have to keep up the tradition of watching every final. I just hope that no seismic event in my life happens at the same time. There is a lot to be said for a quiet life.